Burrowing A Gopher Hole

From: https://web.archive.org/web/20210129184931/https://tedium.co/2017/06/22/modern-day-gopher-history/

The Gopher protocol isn't supported by the modern web basically at all, but
despite this, it lingers on, a quarter century from its peak. Here's how.

   Written by Ernie Smith on Jun 22, 2017

   altavista, cameron kaiser, gopher, gopher servers, internet, internet
   history, wikipedia

   Today in Tedium: Every time I use pieces of the early internet, I get
   this warm feeling in my chest. It's hard to describe, but I imagine
   it's a feeling not unlike the feeling that went through the crowd
   during the Sex Pistols concert at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall
   on June 4, 1976. There's a sense of purity and simplicity there that is
   hard to recapture through other means-the sense that I'm witnessing
   something culturally important that, in its own way, could change the
   world. It feels unadulterated, without the frayed ends and sense of
   familiarity that come with years or even weeks of constant use. And
   it's one of those things where, if you feel it once, it's kind of like
   a drug. I had that feeling recently when I was reading up on Gopher, a
   part of the internet that got overshadowed by the World Wide Web, but
   in its own quiet way, still lingers on. I wanted to check its pulse-and
   while it's not a hustle-and-bustle in the way that, say, Twitter is, it
   carries. Tonight's Tedium talks about the Gopher scene in 2017. Yes,
   there still is one. - Ernie @ Tedium

70

   The standard port number that Gopher uses for online connections, a
   standard set in stone in 1993 by the Internet Assigned Numbers
   Authority. (The web, generally uses port 80, while Telnet uses port 23,
   and FTP port 21.) Despite being in heavy use throughout the early '90s,
   the technology faded from use as the web became more common, and as a
   result, it's difficult to find a modern tool that allows you to connect
   to Gopher sites. (One exception is Matt Owen's Gopher Browser, a client
   for Windows that came to life relatively recently.) The Overbite
   Project, located at Floodgap Systems, has a list of preferred clients,
   if you're interested in hopping on board.

   Adam Curry

   Adam Curry once wore a Gopher shirt on TV as a way to cover the
   licensing fees for the server he ran at MTV.com. (YouTube)

Five things you should know about Gopher's history

    1. How it was born: In 1991, a group of computer scientists that
       worked in the Microcomputer Center at the University of Minnesota
       built a lightweight method of accessing and distributing
       information online. The design of the system was such that the
       server load was very modest. The university at first disowned the
       project, but public interest kept it alive.
    2. What it was like: It was designed for a text-based interface, and
       it showed. Highly structured around a file system, it focused less
       on appearance and more on organization. The result particularly
       shines in Lynx, the text-based web browser.
    3. Interesting quirks: Archie Comics got a lot of love on the early
       internet, particularly on Gopher. In a mimic of the Archie FTP
       search tool, a team at the University of Nevada-Reno came up with
       Veronica, a search tool specifically built to search the entire
       Gophersphere. It was Gopher's version of Google, without the highly
       commercial element. A variation of Veronica, Jughead, was created
       for searching on a single Gopher server.
    4. Notable users: Perhaps the most famous user of Gopher in 1993 was
       Adam Curry, the MTV VJ and later podcast innovator who purchased
       the mtv.com domain and used the domain to host an unofficial online
       presence for the TV network. (When he left MTV, Curry's ownership
       of a valuable three-letter domain led to a messy legal battle.)
    5. The turning point: Two things happened in 1993 that ultimately
       proved greatly damaging to Gopher as a medium. First, the release
       of the graphical NCSA Mosaic, which supported Gopher but ultimately
       focused on web technologies, eventually helped the web surpass
       Gopher in uptake. And second, the University of Minnesota, which
       had not properly resourced for Gopher, requested a licensing fee
       for for-profit uses of the platform, and did so in a way that
       scared off even non-commercial users. By the late '90s, web
       browsers had stopped supporting Gopher, hastening its return to
       obscurity.

   Kaiser

   An ascii-art photo of Floodgap founder Cameron Kaiser. (per Kaiser's
   homepage on Gopher)

This guy might be the most influential figure in the Gophersphere in 2017

   Cameron Kaiser has a lot of time, heart, and soul invested in Gopher.
   But don't mistake his passion for the protocol and its many servers for
   mere nostalgia. He sees Gopher as structurally better than the Web in a
   number of hugely important ways.

   "I like a lot of things about Gopher-its easy parsing, the simple
   protocol, low bandwidth and computing requirements and relatively few
   moving parts," he explained to me in a interview. "I think the Web has
   gone the wrong direction on all of these attributes, and I didn't want
   to see Gopher go away in its shadow."

   The operator of Floodgap Systems, who has been active on Gopher since
   1993 and has operated his own servers since 1999, has found himself in
   the position of being the Gopher protocol's most important steward.

   Among the things that Floodgap does that are valuable for Gopher: It
   watches over a sizable repository of unique content on its own Gopher
   server; it maintains a list of active and recently updated Gopher
   servers, so they can be easily found and used; it hosts the only active
   Veronica-2 search engine on the entire Gophersphere; it keeps a list of
   clients for each platform; and, most importantly for people who don't
   have access to such clients, it offers a web-based proxy for accessing
   Gopher sites.

   While he points out there are some weaknesses in the technology he
   offers, it's hard to ignore the impressiveness of what's mostly a
   one-man shop. He points in particular to the strides of his Veronica-2
   system.

   "Even though Veronica-2 is hardly Google-class, I'm proud of how much
   it has indexed, that the system is also aggressive about expiring
   servers that are gone, and the fact that it gives people a reliable
   foothold into Gopherspace to look at what's there," he noted by way of
   example. "Floodgap is also one of the few sites providing automatically
   maintained news and weather; there is a battery of systems on the
   backend that find, convert and index content for use and it all runs
   generally without intervention."

   Why put in all this work? In large part, it's because he sees Gopher as
   an extremely important platform, one that is both structurally
   consistent and is designed to put the power of the interface into the
   hands of the user-unlike a website where the visual look and
   functionality is driven by the developer. This, notes Kaiser, holds
   benefits specifically for machines of an older vintage.

   "The retro community is discovering the ugly truth: If it can't browse
   the Web, people think it's not useful as a computer," he explained.
   "And a 1MHz 6502 or an old 68K Mac can't browse the modern web. But
   they can browse Gopher because the protocol and interface makes little
   demand on the client, which happily by simple convergence is also
   Web-like, and there are many resources out there that are still hosted
   on Gopher."

"Gopher is the information without the flair, the HTML without the
Javascript. Gopher gives me what I want when what I want is to read stuff,
not like/comment/interact/favorite/share etc. I'm a big fan of all of those
things, but sometimes I just want to read a thing on an old computer and
follow a few links. Gopher lets me do that. It's ultimate Old Web and I am
one of those ultimate Old Web ladies who still uses Lynx occasionally just so
some BOFH will see it in their web logfiles and, hopefully, smile."

   - Jessamyn C. West, a Vermont librarian and onetime MetaFilter
   employee, discussing why she worked to convince the community site to
   bring back its long-dormant Gopher server, which it relaunched last
   year after a 15-year hiatus. (BOFH, in case you're wondering, is
   "Bastard Operator From Hell," a fictional sysadmin that dates back to
   the Gopher era.) So how much use is the Gopher version of MetaFilter
   getting? According to site operator Josh Millard, the read-only server
   is generally pretty quiet and allowed to live on its lonesome, but it
   does have a certain appeal for some types of users, especially on long
   comment threads, when CSS and Javascript can slow down the page. "It's
   definitely got some appeal as a lightweight option for the nuclear
   bunker," Milliard said. MetaFilter is by far the best-known mainstream
   site in the modern-day Gophersphere, but it's far from the only one.

   GopherVista

People are still doing innovative things with Gopher, even now

   Last month, the long-dormant search engine AltaVista made a surprising
   comeback onto the internet, in all its late-'90s glory.

   No, Verizon didn't get any weird ideas about reviving the name after
   completing its recent acquisition of Yahoo. Instead, a young
   hacker-type that works for CloudFlare launched a brand new version of
   AltaVista, based on a 20-year-old server app called AltaVista Personal,
   for the simple purpose of creating a Gopher search engine.

   "The idea was originally a concept I had to prove to a friend you can
   still run 1996 software in a modern system," Ben Cox explained. "Gopher
   is a conveniently retro data source!"

   Cox, who is 22 and was as a result a toddler when AltaVista's server
   software was first released, noted that much of his work is based
   around the intricacies of the HTTP and HTTP/2 protocols, making working
   in Gopher a comparative cake walk.

   "Unlike HTTP and HTTP/2, where there are lots of odd rules you may have
   to follow, Gopher has very few rules you have to follow, and most of
   them involve the logic behind serving the directory pages, not content
   itself," he explained. "this makes it a great hobby project since it's
   entertaining to use, and not likely to be frustrating to deal with edge
   cases."

   (In case you're in the mood to try to build your own Gopher Altavista
   server, he helpfully put the code up on GitHub.)

   Gopherpedia

   He's not the only hobbyist cracking Gopher's bones. A slightly older
   project that added a lot of value to Gopher as a whole is Gopherpedia,
   which (as you might guess) is a Gopher version of Wikipedia.

   In a text-only interface like Lynx, it feels utterly natural, like
   Wikipedia was made for this format. I know I was smitten. But creator
   Colin Mitchell says that he sees the tool as being better for some use
   cases than others, due in no small part to its lack of hyperlinks.

   "I hear from a lot of people that they use Gopherpedia because it works
   really well on low-bandwidth connections. If you know exactly what you
   want to read about, you can look it up and start reading without
   loading all the extra chrome that comes with Wikipedia," Mitchell told
   me in an interview. "On the other hand, I think Gopherpedia really
   suffers from the lack of hyperlinks, because one of the great things
   about wikipedia is the serendipity of finding really interesting links
   in an article you're reading."

   So why Wikipedia? Turns out Mitchell had spent some time working a
   Ruby-based Gopher server named Gopher 2000, and wanted a project that
   put the server through its paces. He picked the largest thing possible,
   of course.

   "I like to joke that it's probably the biggest site in Gopherspace in
   terms of content, but I think that must actually be true," he added.

   While not officially sanctioned by the Wikimedia Foundation, it's
   polished enough that it seems like it should be. (While the server runs
   into the occasional hiccup, it's quite slick for a service that 50 to
   100 users rely on daily.) And he's still making improvements. At first,
   the platform imported Wikipedia articles en masse, but eventually he
   moved to an API-based interface "so in theory it's always up to date."

   So what drives projects like these, anyway? Clearly, the public benefit
   of these ideas is relatively small. A big part of it might simply be
   that it's good for practice. Mitchell cited his work on Gopherpedia as
   a boost to his skills with the Ruby programming language, for example.

   "I've gained a lot of respect for early internet technologies, and an
   interest in keeping them alive as much as possible," Mitchell noted.

   "Gopher, naturally, will never be what it was," Cameron Kaiser admitted
   in his comments on the platform.

   It's not 1993, and pretty graphics won out, even though they use a
   whole lot more bandwidth, put stress on servers, and inevitably force
   us to use more powerful technology than we really need for basic tasks.

   That said, nearly everyone I talked to for this piece spoke up on how
   Gopher's general capabilities-in particular, its ease of use-remain a
   virtue even into 2017. It's not hard to get a server on Gopher, for
   example, if you have even a touch of technical interest. The protocol
   is dead simple. There's even a tool for converting WordPress posts
   directly into a "phlog," the Gopher variation of a blog.

   It's with these phlogs-particularly those located on the SDF Public
   Access UNIX System, a nonprofit service which Jessamyn West describes
   as "what I remember Gopher servers to be like"-that the true potential
   of Gopher is laid bare. It feels intimate in a way that the web hasn't
   since perhaps the earliest days of LiveJournal.

   Gopher feels like the place to go if you want to pretend Donald Trump
   doesn't exist for half an hour. If you took Facebook and removed all
   commercial influence from it-along with the cruft that such influence
   brings-you might get something like Gopher.

   Of course, the question is, is there room for something like this on
   the modern-day internet? Kaiser suggests there is-especially as more
   machines become "vintage," unable to keep up with the ever-increasing
   system requirements of the web.

   "There's very little barrier to entry and it's conceptually simple to
   understand and get up and running," Kaiser said of Gopher. "And that
   will ensure its long term survival even if only at a very low level
   into the future."

   Sure, it doesn't look like much, but perhaps looks were never the
   point.
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